Putting aside the skritter example sentences, which will be great eventually but are a work in progress, I'm looking to use pleco dictionaries for example sentences (as can link straight through to pleco dictionaries from skritter ios word pop-up).

Which dictionaries not included in the professional bundle include the most/most useful example sentences? Seems like Tuttle is useful, but that is only a small dictionary - which other dictionaries are people using for example sentences? Oxford? Or more generally, "essential" dictionaries not included in that package, and for what reason.

Thanks!

@ricksh

I so far downloaded pretty much all the dictionaries within pleco, that means the free and the ones you have to pay for.

when I go through them in search for sentences what I see is:

OX (Oxford): no sentences at all

TL (Tuttle): sentences

ABC (ABC Compr.) : sentences

PLC (Pleco C-E: Lots of example sentences

So the most useful in terms of example sentences would be Pleco dictionary.

OX actually has tons of examples - they don't include Pinyin (not part of the original dictionary and we're not allowed to add it), but you can look up the pronunciation for characters you don't recognize by tapping on them.

I did my trial run with the word 喜欢， (xihuan, like). and in ox there was not one single example sentence.

True, no examples for 喜欢, but lots of them in general - 喜报 and 喜好 and 喜事 and 喜悦 all include examples, e.g.

Thanks learninglife for doing some checks for me, most helpful - do you find it useful to have the full bunch of dictionaries - I mean, do you use them all consistently? I have been doing some checks on the demos, and it seems need ABC and 21st as some words I checked were only in these (though I did choose rather offbeat words). The loss in the professional bundle is NWP, and I've noticed since writing my post that at http://www.skritter.com/forum/topic?id=200982242 lechaun has NWP as having the best sample sentences ...

Thanks Mike for the input, much appreciated - I don't mind if dictionaries have pinyin or not - once pleco has an add to skritter button, pleco and skritter will be a winning combination! (if I was to nitpick the current set-up, I would say that the "return to skritter" button should stay on every page on pleco when have entered via skritter, rather than having to press "back" until get to the original page).

pleco and esp. its optical character recognizer are the greatest tools ever invented that make learning chinese fun without the need to carry heavy dictionaries.

@ricksh When I am using the optical char. recognizer (which you have to pay for) I dont really care which dictionary I use.
But they are all helpful, each dictionary has its advantages.
And the main reason why I bought all the dictionaries is out of gratitude for pleco so they can earn some money for their great work.

I'm also harvesting a lot of sentences out of dictionaries and dropping them into Anki, and I like having a variety of dictionaries.

1st choice - the GF (Xiandai Hanyu Guifan Cidian), at least for those times when I can manage with C-C. If it's too much for a particular word, then I check out the C-E dictionaries. Has sentences but no pinyin or translation.

2nd choice is ABC. Good sentences and I just really like the dictionary.

3rd choice is usually PLC, which has the most examples but some of the sentences (at least in translation) are a bit heavy on the revolutionary-speak...

ricksh - good point on "Return to Skritter," we'll see what we can do about that. You could try enabling the option to have the definition and result list on the same screen, though that can be a little cramped...

learninglife j.h. - thanks for your business!

snowcreature99 - yeah, we're working on that issue with PLC; recently licensed a newer edition of the dictionary it's based on which has a lot fewer of those sentences, and we're also going through and sanitizing some of them ourselves; "these ancient artifacts prove that Taiwan has always been a part of China" turns into "these ancient artifacts prove that Hogwarts has always been a part of China."